Why Can’t Lottocrats and Their Critics Communicate?

In “The Lottocratic Mentality and Lottocracy: Talking Past One Another?” I reviewed two recently published books on sortition, Lottocracy by Alexander Guerrero and The Lottocratic Mentality by Christina Lafont and Nadia Urbinati. One of the many reasons why these books are particularly apt to be reviewed together is that their authors, Guerrero and Lafont, in 2021 won the American Philosophical Association’s Leibowitz Prize, for their dialogue with each other about lottocracy. Guerrero’s book and Lafont and Urbinati’s book were both prepared presumptively in the context of their extended contact with each other about the topics on which they wrote. Guerrero’s book, Lottocracy, was published in 2021, and in the introduction to his book he thanks Lafont for her extended engagement with his work, and says that he looks forward to reading her future book, co-authored with Urbinati, raising objections to lottocracy. That book, The Lottocratic Mentality, published three years later in 2024, likewise in the introduction thanks Guerrero for access to his book prior to its publication, and promises to engage with the ideas of his book at length in what follows.

It is striking then that these books have little to say about the arguments that are made by the other. In “The Lottocratic Mentality and Lottocracy: Talking Past One Another?”, I go over the areas where these authors discuss the same topics but where their arguments simply do not meet.

The most notable omitted point of contact concerns an argument from Guerrero that is in many ways the centrepiece of his book: that elected representatives rely on accountability to the public for both their efficacy at promoting the public interest, and their legitimacy, and that meaningful accountability of representatives to their constituents is impossible. Guerrero argues that modern political issues are far too complex and opaque for citizens to monitor their representatives effectively. 

The Lottocratic Mentality makes its case for electoral democracy in a way that depends deeply on the idea that elected legislators are meaningfully accountable to those they represent, and so for its success depends on demonstrating that Guerrero’s accountability argument fails. But it has almost nothing to say in response to this accountability argument. While they acknowledge that meaningful accountability is ‘very difficult’ under electoral democracy, they argue that the lack of accountability and its attendant problems is even worse for lottocracy. This does not grapple with the fatal nature of Guerrero’s argument - if the legitimacy of electoral democracy depends on its accountability, and it is not accountable, then it is not legitimate, regardless of whatever problems lottocratic democracy might have. Nor does it grapple with Guerrero’s contention that accountability is only instrumentally valuable for achieving responsiveness and that lottocracy can be responsive without being accountable.

This kind of problem is emblematic of what I perceive as a general mis-match between the arguments made by lottocracy and those made by its critics. In general, lottocrats are interested in arguing that lottocray has epistemic qualities that make it excellent for promoting the public interest. They tend to be written in a way that would appeal to epistemic democrats, whether the authors identify with that label themselves or not. By contrast critics of lottocracy tend to argue that irrespective of these epistemic claims lottocracy is illegitimate because it is not procedurally democratic. Arguments of these kinds do not naturally have much to say in response to one another.

Reader, do you agree that this is the general shape of the debate? If so, why do you think that is? If not, why do you suppose that lottocrats and their critics so often seem to be talking past one another?